install from networked computer

Okay so here's my idea. My desktop is running Arch so in /var/cache/pacman/pkg I have all the packages required for installation cause I've never really purged that directory so everything should still be there which would explain why pacman is pretty slow these days

At any rate, to make installation on another computer quicker, could I go through install as normal, but once pacman is installed, mount the pkg dir via NFS as the local pkg dir and then pacman would install everything from there? I haven't really played with the install CD much, I've installed Arch twice and didn't have any trouble either time so I have delved into any internals at all but is there a reason this wouldn't work?

Just wondering if anybody has done this or if anybody thinks it wouldn't work. If it does I'll write a wiki page if anybody thinks it'd be useful.

Re: install from networked computer

Cam wrote:

At any rate, to make installation on another computer quicker, could I go through install as normal, but once pacman is installed, mount the pkg dir via NFS as the local pkg dir and then pacman would install everything from there? I haven't really played with the install CD much, I've installed Arch twice and didn't have any trouble either time so I have delved into any internals at all but is there a reason this wouldn't work?

Just wondering if anybody has done this or if anybody thinks it wouldn't work. If it does I'll write a wiki page if anybody thinks it'd be useful.

Basically, you can do it two ways:1. you can mount /var/cache/pacman/pkg as boxname/current/os/i686 for an anonymous ftp access. read, you just have to bring up an ftp server and boot the other box for a networkinstall. You will have to download current.db.tar.gz b4 and stuff it into the cache-dir.

2. you can use a set of scripts to redirect the output of pacman -r to the nfs mount and the have quickinst running on that box, which is the easier and more universal approach. you will have to create a list of packages you want to have on your new box b4.